There have always been great games. We find plenty of old, obscure titles and appreciate their design today. Not just that—they’re fun. Nostalgia is hitting our culture big time. It has been for a while now. That’s another topic. I spent some time wondering about all that, then tried to figure out why I’m more interested in games now than I’ve ever been.
The itch for style—
So, there’s one thing about today’s games that grabbed me in particular. Stylization. Most things online drift toward enshittification, but the indie scene keeps growing. Stylization—the deliberate crafting of games as art—has entered the mainstream, even among large companies. Stylized games move more freely between indie and mainstream spaces. Retro graphics, animated art, visual novels, painted worlds, unusual interfaces, old things returning in altered forms; all of it reaches broader audiences than it used to. Tiny teams can find real audiences with highly personal projects. And big studios do spend millions, but not only on worlds that look like reality with better lighting. In recent years, we’ve seen more games show what the medium could always do: direct attention, shape perception, and create experiences other media can’t quite offer in the same way. We’re also seeing manga and game-adjacent animation become mainstream: there’s Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix. And I’m glad it’s there. The crowd seems more open to style, pulp and fantasy. And maybe fewer kids will be called weird for reading manga, watching anime and collecting game magazines today. It never should’ve been weird in the first place. But we know that stuff by heart, don’t we? In the ’80s, some folks were after Dungeons & Dragons. 2000s, it was shooters and computer games. I’m drifting, but, look, that’s a win I can recognize.
Now, I’m not saying the less stylized action-story games aren’t great. Some are. More than some, perhaps. They build a clean world, establish a reality similar enough to ours to feel familiar, and let you interact within it. We experience the story, go on adventures, explore. The Last of Us. A good one. A very good one.
More fantastical games can work in much the same way. The key is coherence. The visuals are established, usually clean. Objects are placed. Menus introduced. Cutscenes follow the same visual identity as the world, or take that look and turn it cinematic. A coherent graphical world appears.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Depending on the world, I can get interested. I bought Enslaved: Odyssey to the West back in 2010. What a game. Still has me in awe. If you’re into games and don’t know it, have a look. It’s on Steam now too. Aesthetically, it has a lot in common with Horizon Zero Dawn. People have speculated about whether Horizon was heavily inspired by Enslaved, and I get it. It makes sense. Anyone who studied Enslaved made a good decision. That game feels intimate, original. It has a strong atmosphere, but not one that seems to have simply been placed there. It’s just there naturally. Overgrown technology, Monkey and Trip, an alternate frontier world... I’ve always been really interested in worlds where time took different turns. Worlds that feel free but make everyone struggle for their freedom. These are the places my adolescent mind used to wander off to. It’s not quite the apocalyptic thing, though that can be fun too. Think of places like the ones in Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke, Sable or The Last of Us, or the world of Cowboy Bebop. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World comes to mind. A 2003 film about Aubrey, a restless, mischievous Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars. Naturally, Enslaved fit right in. It quickly became one of my favorites.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
is another title I want to play at some point. It was developed by Ninja Theory, the people who made Enslaved, and seems to be a great example of what I’m circling around. From what I’ve seen and read, it looks like one of those games that blur gameplay, subjectivity, and perception. The world passes through Senua before it reaches the player. It plays with perception and asks the player, «What is real?» Or possibly, «What can be real?» I’m looking forward to that.
Just a year ago,
I finished Ghost of Tsushima and had a good time. The intentional art direction drew me in, and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a Kurosawa Mode that turns the game black and white. They created perhaps the most iconic modern samurai game and added a mode that honors and evokes 1954’s Seven Samurai. Good call. And there’s the way you ride across Japanese flower fields and rush through tall grass. Wind moves through the world and guides you. I hadn’t seen it portrayed quite like that before.
Then there’s Devolver Digital. If any publisher could own the term “stylized,” it might be them.
And Gris, from 2018—
a platformer about a woman trying to regain parts of herself. Colors. The game resembles watercolors, paintings, and drawings from the start. Every now and then, when we recover a color or solve a puzzle, we’re rewarded in a special way. We get a short scene, playful and personal, and see even more detailed animations. There are sculptures, elegant structures, large empty spaces. The cover art is memorable and influences the whole thing. Gris found its own way to carry a strong mood and theme, and it doesn’t need much for that. We play within the style as much as we play with the controls. Almost as if someone attached a car battery to their sketchbook and brought it to life.
I sat at my desk—
letting my mind ramble about games while listening to liquid drum and bass. That’s my kind of lo-fi background music. By then, I had already realized there were far more stylized, unique games than I had thought, and had started building something of a personal canon. Of course, it all started with Disco Elysium three years ago. See, I’m a common breed.
The other thing I noticed was how games combine different genres and techniques, and how many gorgeous games favor art and animation over graphical realism. I kept browsing my catalog, reading, looking at screenshots and videos, until a pattern began to show: most of the games I play lean hard into style and atmosphere, blur gameplay and perception, or combine a variety of elements. And some of them do it all! Now that I understood what drew me in, I kept thinking. Naturally. One must not play games but understand them!
Disco Elysium
uses a well-established CRPG system, tabletop mechanics, and a UI that is unusual yet accessible. Does that make it good? Not yet. That makes it work. On top of that, there’s Rostov’s evocative art, along with writing that is dense, unapologetic, funny, miserable, and deeply subjective. The portraits don’t merely illustrate the people, and the skills don’t just display numbers. The interface, the writing, the art, and the protagonist’s mind keep entering one another. The world feels alive in an unusual way. A special moment in my playthrough was the city itself speaking directly to me through the Shivers skill. "I NEED YOU. YOU CAN KEEP ME ON THIS EARTH. BE VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU."
Baldur’s Gate 3
delivered a classical tabletop RPG in turn-based form. What made it memorable was prose-like dialog, heavy character development, incredible cinematic scenes, and sex—as well as incredibly cinematic sex scenes. It is a game about moving through a large world and looking for the next bit of character development, the next encounter. Personally, it totally had me. I was chasing cutscenes, theorycrafting builds and combat. Familiar systems carry all of it: dice, stats, inventories, branching choices, combat, character builds. That makes the game work. What gets built around those systems is what makes it Baldur’s Gate 3.
I think that is where stylization and creative direction become most interesting to me. Not when every part looks unusual for no reason, but when the parts begin shaping an experience. Art changes how the systems feel; interfaces direct attention. The pacing creates a mood that the dialog alone could not. While working on game-design concepts, I started calling that result frozen perception. A game creates a particular way of seeing and holds it long enough for someone else to enter. You move through frozen perception, act inside it, notice what it lets you notice. The phrase arrived before I had fully worked out what I meant, which is often how these things go. It stayed because it points toward what I like in all these games.
These games don’t share one style. That would be an odd looking game. What they share is intention carried beyond appearance. Somebody decided how the experience should feel, then kept deciding.
There are more interesting games now than I could ever play. Small personal projects, indie hybrids, enormous RPGs, games that resemble paintings, games that barely resemble games until you begin doing something. I like looking through them, seeing what stays with me. Lately, there has been a lot.